Zerowait is an international 3rd party provider of Parts, Services, and Support for Network Appliance equipment and the developer of SimplStor and SimplStor EVS.
Offices in USA, UK & AUS. Visit our On Line store http://www.thezerowaitstore.com/

Thursday, November 18, 2010

As NetApp Revamps Majority of Product Line, Zerowait Assures Users of Ongoing Support for Older Systems

Wilmington, DE (Vocus) November 18, 2010

Zerowait has expanded its independent NetApp support program to include newer FAS3000 and FAS6000 systems and storage, even as they continue to reduce their support prices. The Zerowait Parts Assurance (ZPA) policy provides automated monitoring of System Autosupports, including weekly System Status Reports, through the Exception Reporter program, Next Business Day before return replacement of failed components, and 24/7 access to friendly, knowledgeable engineers.

Rob Robinson, Vice President of Sales, says, “Many NetApp customers are shocked when they get a quote from NetApp to continue the support of systems coming out of warranty.” He continued ‘NetApp’s goal is to get the customer to replace their current hardware by keeping support costs for older hardware very high, since they are a hardware sales company. The quality and performance of NetApp storage over the last 5 years has reached the point that most customers are very satisfied with their current systems, and would prefer to continue using them while saving the cost of upgrading. Extending the useful life of a system out to 5 or 6 years allows customers to get the maximum ROI on their storage investment.’

Mike Linett, Zerowait’s President, added, ‘Zerowait is a service company. Our goal is to help our customers get the best return on their NetApp investment. We can typically save the customer 40% - 50% on service, while providing the support and uptime they expect for high availability storage. Our large inventory of parts and Off Lease Systems ensures we have the parts to repair your systems, the shelves and drives to help you grow your system to meet growing storage demands, and complete systems with transferable licenses when your storage needs change or expand. We have customers who depend on 10 year old systems, and depend on Zerowait to keep them going. Whether you have an F330 or a FAS6080, we have the parts and expertise to ensure the uptime you expect from your systems.’

With offices in the US, Europe, and soon, Australia, Zerowait can provide support on a global basis. To arrange for a no obligation review of your system’s status and a support quote, please contact your local Zerowait office today.

About Zerowait:Headquartered in Wilmington, DE USA; is the worldwide leader in independent service and support of NetApp filers. Zerowait solutions include off-lease fully licensed NetApp systems and the new SimplStor line of single name space archive storage. Storage administrators throughout the world rely on Zerowait to provide affordable solutions to the skyrocketing costs of data storage.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

This week I was in Australia visiting our customers and talking to them about our SimplStor product line. Our customers in Australia clearly understand that our products can save them a lot of money and one of them pointed me to an information week article that is worth reading. The article ends with this statement.

"Staying with the current paradigm is sustainable only until the unstoppable force of data growth runs smack into the immovable constraint of funding. What happens then? Our money is on the data. To stay competitive, companies of all sizes must explore creative, cost-effective storage alternatives."

One customer said that using Zerowait for their NetApp Service and support has been great, and as they expand they really like the idea of SimplStor for their secondary storage solution. When combined with the storage switch which provides a single Namespace they get the high end storage they need and their price for disk stays very low. They really liked the idea of the starter kit we introduced this month, as it makes storage reliability both simple and affordable.

Thursday, November 04, 2010

Many of our customers like to differentiate between competitors and peers. When we look at all the different hardware, services and support that Zerowait provides our customers around the world we find it hard to find any peers. We are keenly aware of our competitors though, and there are a few competitors in each part of our business. But we are unaware of any single company that provides all of the services that Zerowait does.

Many folks would say that EMC, NetApp and IBM are competitors, but they are not peers. They are very different companies and they each have many capabilities that their competition does not have. They are peers in some aspects of their businesses, and when there is a very similar offering from each of them a savvy customer will seek competitive bids. For instance the IBM N series and NetAppFAS series are essentially the same product, with slightly different bezels, stickers, and support models.

IBM, EMC, and NetApp are all customers of Seagate and Hitachi for disks. I am pretty confident that Seagate and Hitachi treat the big three slightly differently based on sales and profitability factors.

Our SimplStor product also uses drives from Seagate or Hitachi, and components from many of the same manufacturers that the big three use. However common the components we all use, we are not competitors.

When Zerowait was a NetApp reseller in the late 1990's our focus was selling the F740 and F760 into the departmental storage niche market. That market niche was not being targeted by either EMC or IBM and so we were able to sell our customers NetApp filers without much competition.

In a similar way our SimplStor is a targeted and unique product. It is targeted towards our customers who need the reliability of name brand components, but want to avoid high priced proprietary software features and support pricing. One of our customers recently mentioned that our lease pricing is lower than the price he was quoted by a cloud service provider, and he did not have the security issues to deal with. At the SEG show in Denver a lot of folks were very interested in a Petabyte of storage that can fit in a single standard rack, and were surprised that we could offer it for $300,000.00 with a switch to provide a single Namespace, and support.

The way we look at our SimplStor product it is not a competitive product, but a complementary product to the big three's offerings that can work well in mixed environments and reduce our customers' costs substantially.